Comps, or, Making it Easier for Users to Find Software

[Jeremy Katz]

On Mon, 2006-04-17 at 11:20 -0700, Michael Thomas wrote:
> Jeremy Katz wrote:
> > On Sun, 2006-04-16 at 12:00 -0700, Wart wrote:
> > One thing that would help is a script to be run as a pre-commit check to
> > ensure the file is well-formed.  
> 
> I'll ask the SIG to see if we can come up with something.  What are the
> rules for pre-commit scripts in terms of languages, locations,
> dependencies, etc.?  Or is it enough to run xmlwf on the file?

The XML file just needs to be well-formed.  Eventually, translations
will be getting merged in, but that's the "easy" part.  And dependencies
also don't need to be specified as those get resolved at runtime

> >>Additionaly, it seems that the FE games are listed as 'optional'
> >>packages in yum, which means that users can't use 'yum groupinstall
> >>games' as a shortcut to get all of them.  What determines if a package
> >>is 'optional' or 'required'?  Would it be possible to change it so that
> >>users can get all of the games via 'yum groupinstall', either by
> >>reclassifying the FE5 games as 'required', or by creating a new category
> >>for these games?
> > 
> > 
> > If a package is required, then the group isn't considered installed
> > without the package being installed.  You almost certainly don't want
> > that behavior with all of the games :-)  And I don't even think a
> > separate category is really what's wanted.  What problem are you trying
> > to solve by installing all of the games?[1]
> 
> The ultimate problem is that I'm trying to avoid doing any real work.
> :)  I'd like to be able to install all of the games with one command
> after an initial system install, and later use one command to pull in
> any new games that have since been added to the repo.

Heh ;)

> > Jeremy
> > 
> > [1] Note, that it would be pretty easy to write the little tool using
> > the yum interfaces that just installed all of the optional packages in a
> > group.
> 
> That's what I did for now, which is when I discovered that 'yum
> groupinfo' didn't list them all.  Perhaps there could be an option to
> 'yum groupinstall' to install optional packages, such as
> "yum --includeoptional groupinstall games".

Yeah, I'm thinking that something like this is probably the best
approach to the problem.  It shouldn't be that hard to add support for
both
* yum groupinstall --alloptional foo
and
* yum groupinstall --requiredonly foo

to yum.  Anyone want to volunteer to write the patch? :-)

Jeremy